973.7L63 
B3HUUab 


Hertz,   Emanuel. 

Abraham  Lincoln  and  the 
Lowly  • 


LINCOLN  ROOM 

UNIVERSITY  OF  ILLINOIS 
LIBRARY 


MEMORIAL 

the  Class  of  1901 

founded  by 

HARLAN  HOYT  HORNER 

and 

HENRIETTA  CALHOUN  HORNER 


k&t£ 


ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 
AND  THE  LOWLY 


'Like  His  Great  Prototype  in  Egypt,   This 
Modern  Moses  Ever   Went  Among  the 
Poor  and  Lowly" 


By 
EMANUEL  HERTZ 


Reprinted  from  The  Jewish  Tribune  of  February  10,  1928 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 

in  2012  with  funding  from 

University  of  Illinois  Urbana-Champaign 


http://www.archive.org/details/abrahamlincolnloOOhert 


ABRAHAM  LINCOLN 


**»        B3H4-  ■ 

*3 


ABRAHAM  LINCOLN  AND  THE  LOWLY 

By  EMANUEL  HERTZ 

¥  N  the  first  address  delivered  when  he  was  a  candidate  for  the 
•*■  first  time  for  the  Illinois  Legislature,  Lincoln  concluded  his 
statement  by  saying:  "I  was  born,  and  have  ever  remained,  in 
the  most  humble  walks  of  life.  I  have  no  wealthy  or  popular 
relations  or  friends  to  recommend  me.  My  case  is  thrown  ex- 
clusively upon  the  independent  voters  of  the  country ;  and,  if. 
elected,  they  will  have  conferred  a  favor  upon  me  for  which  I 
shall  be  unremitting  in  my  labors  to  compensate.  But,  if  the 
good  people  in  their  wisdom  shall  see  fit  to  keep  me  in  the  back- 
ground, I  have  been  too  familiar  with  disappointments  to  be 
very  much  chagrined. " 

From  this  moment,  until  the  first  great  victory  of  his  difficult 
struggle  for  recognition — his  nomination  for  the  Presidency — 
he  always  lived  and  adhered  to  his  constant  association  and  life 
with  the  poor,  the  bereaved,  the  working  mass  of  his  fellows. 
When  asked  for  a  biography  for  campaign  purposes,  he  re- 
plied :  "The  story  of  my  life  is  the  'short  and  simple  annals  of 
the  poor.'  '  And  these  early  settlers  were  poor,  indeed.  At 
every  point  in  life  up  to  that  moment,  his  career  had  been  a 
struggle  with  adverse  circumstances,  with  poverty,  both  his  own 
and  that  of  the  poor  townspeople  of  Springfield  and  those  he 
met  on  the  circuit.  He  lived  with  them,  he  sympathized  with 
their  problems,  he  loved  the  plain  people  and  they  loved  him  and 
suffered  with  him  through  all  his  trials.  He  could  not  help  de- 
tecting— not  that  he  cared — -a  sort  of  patronizing  condescension 
of  the  leaders  of  the  Eastern  and  New  England  elite  to  the 
frontiersman  of  Sangamon  County,  the  pleader  of  the  causes 
of  the  poor  denizens  of  the  Eighth  Circuit,  the  tribune  of  these 
poor  country  store  farmer  politicians.     His  famous,  illustrative, 


78741' 


quaint  stories  and  droll  reminiscences,  the  very  pranks  he  played 
upon  the  so-called  better  class  or  wealthier  citizens,  were  ever 
taken  from  the  lives  of  the  lowly  and  the  experiences  of  the 
poor.  They  were  his  friends  in  the  early  days  of  his  great 
struggles ;  they  met  him  in  his  grocery  store,  they  were  his 
associates  on  the  farm,  they  visited  his  modest  law  office,  they 
supported  him  in  his  campaigns,  they  sent  him  to  Congress,  they 
crowded  the  courthouse,  the  lawns  in  front  of  the  courthouse 
when  he  spoke  to  them  at  recess,  and  they  trooped  after  him 
during  the  joint  debate  which  made  him  famous,  and  they 
eagerly  followed  him  on  his  tour  to  Washington,  and  finally 
greeted  his  remains  on  their  mournful  return,  to  rest  among  the 
neighbors  and  friends  of  his  early  trials  and  tribulations. 

And  wherever  he  went  during  the  twenty-odd  years  of  his 
preparation  for  the  Great  Adventure — his  Presidential  Admin- 
istration— he  sought  out  the  plain  people,  the  common  people, 
the  artisan,  and  the  children.  They  flocked  to  him  and  his 
heart  was  theirs.  They  did  not  note  his  appearance,  his  looks, 
his  eyes — those  marvelous  eyes  that  saw  and  pierced  your  soul 
— those  eyes,  Lincoln's  sad  eyes,  attracted  the  innocents  every- 
where. 

And  so  it  was  when  he  came  East  — to  New  York — then  as 
now  the  Gateway  to  the  Continent,  the  city  of  wealth  and  the 
great  mart  of  Mammon,  then  as  now — when  he  had  concluded 
and  lived  through  his  first  great  ordeal  at  Cooper  Union — where 
the  "best  minds"  of  the  nation  took  his  measure,  and  reluctantly 
admitted  that  a  great  leader  had  come  upon  the  scene  and  had 
spoken  the  message  of  the  Union.  The  poor  people  devoured 
the  editions  of  the  daily  papers  which  carried  his  address — and 
those  publications  immediately  printed  and  published  his  re- 
markable address  in  pamphlet  form — the  greatest  of  its  kind 
ever  delivered  in  New  York  up  to  that  time — its  circulation  ran 
a  close  race  with  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin  and  the  daily  prayer  book. 
He  found  time  to  visit  Plymouth  Church  and  hear  Beecher,  and 


then  he  walked  down  to  the  Mission  at  Five  Points  and  de- 
livered a  short  address  to  a  class  of  children  during  the  religious 
exercises. 

"When  Sunday  morning  came  I  had  nowhere  to  go.  Mr. 
Washburne  proposed  to  take  me  down  to  the  Five  Points  Sun- 
day School.  I  was  very  much  interested  by  what  I  saw.  Mr. 
Pease — the  head  master  of  the  school — wanted  me  to  speak. 
Washburne  spoke  and  then  I  was  urged  to  speak.  I  told  them 
I  did  not  know  anything  about  talking  to  Sunday  Schools,  but 
Mr.  Pease  said  many  of  the  children  were  friendless  and  home- 
less, and  that  a  few  wTords  would  do  them  good.  And  so  I  arose 
to  speak — but  I  didn't  know  what  to  say.  I  remembered  that 
Mr.  Pease  said  they  were  homeless  and  friendless,  and  I 
thought  of  the  time  when  I  had  been  pinched  by  terrible  pov- 
erty. And  so  I  told  them  that  I  had  been  poor ;  that  I  remem- 
bered when  my  toes  stuck  out  through  my  broken  shoes  in 
winter ;  when  my  arms  were  out  at  the  elbows ;  when  I  shivered 
with  the  cold.  And  I  told  them  there  was  only  one  rule;  that 
was,  always  to  do  the  best  you  can.  I  told  them  that  I  had 
always  tried  to  do  the  very  best  I  could  and  that  if  they  fol- 
lowed that  rule  they  would  get  along,  somehow.  That  was 
about  what  I  said.  And  when  I  got  through  Mr.  Pease  said  it 
was  just  the  thing  they  needed.  And  when  the  school  was  dis- 
missed all  the  teachers  came  up  and  shook  hands  with  me  and 
thanked  me,  although  I  did  not  know  that  I  had  been  saying 
anything  of  any  account." 

And  so  Lincoln  greeted  the  nation  with  his  famous  address 
on  the  Bowery,  for  Cooper  Union  then,  as  now,  is  at  the  head 
of  this  old  thoroughfare,  and  finished  his  visit  by  a  stroll  down 
to  the  Five  Points  Mission.  Like  his  great  prototype  in  Egypt, 
who  went  out  to  seek  his  brethren  who  were  being  worked  to 
death  by  the  Pharaoh  of  Antiquity,  so  this  modern  Moses  ever 
went  among  the  poor,  the  lowly,  to  see  his  brothers  struggling 
with  slavery,  with  poverty,  with  ignorance  and  with  temptation. 


And  he  never  appeared  to  better  advantage  than  he  did  when 
among  his  own — he  was  ill  at  ease  in  fine  clothes.  Douglas, 
acquainted  with  the  niceties  of  the  practices  of  good  society, 
who  excelled  in  the  social  graces,  had  to  come  to  his  assistance 
when  about  to  deliver  his  first  inaugural,  which  spelled  life  or 
death  to  the  Union.  But  oh,  how  happy  and  at  home  he  felt 
among  the  poor  and  lowly  of  all  classes.  He  was  never  happier 
in  all  his  trying  and  unhappy  career  than  when  almost  crushed 
by  the  droves  of  the  poor  blacks  when  walking  through  the 
streets  of  Richmond — just  taken  by  his  victorious  army.  He 
was  most  at  home  in  the  open,  under  the  trees.  Said  the 
scholarly  and  aristocratic  Sumner  to  the  polished  Frenchman, 
Laugel :  "Come,  I  will  show  you  a  modern  Saint  Louis  dis- 
pensing justice  under  a  tree/'  He  needed  no  gilded  palaces  of 
justice,  no  formidable  edifice — anywhere,  everywhere,  under 
all  circumstances,  at  all  times,  at  midnight,  early  in  the  morning, 
while  shaving,  while  consuming  his  frugal  meal,  he  was  on  the 
qui  vive  to  do  justice,  to  help  his  fellowman,  to  stop  a  court- 
martial  sentence,  to  hear  the  plea  of  a  heartbroken  mother — on 
one  occasion  in  Yiddish,  a  language  he  did  not  understand — to 
greet  a  neighbor,  to  encourage  a  departing  regiment,  to  get  the 
news  from  the  War  Office  whether  the  condemned  man  still 
lived,  whether  his  boys  in  the  Virginia  marshes  were  still 
struggling  to  maintain  the  law  hallowed  by  the  lives  of  the 
fathers,  who  had  fought  on  a  thousand  battlefields. 

Every  man,  every  woman,  every  child,  every  petitioner,  who 
came  and  took  his  place  in  that  unending  line,  sooner  or  later 
reached  Father  Abraham  and  was  heard.  Hence  the  stately 
and  scholarly  gentlemen  who  preceded  him  in  office — Polk  and 
Fillmore  and  Pierce  and  Buchanan — fairly  shrivel  into  insig- 
nificance beside  this  colossus  of  a  man,  with  a  heart  which  beat 
for  all,  with  a  heart  that  went  out  to  all,  with  a  religious  soul 
which  prayed  for  all,  with  a  Herculean  frame  which  strove  and 
labored  for  all — rich  and  poor  alike.     His  rare,  impatient  out- 

8 


breaks  always  came  when  the  representatives  of  wealth  made 
unreasonable  demands  to  the  detriment  of  or  in  preference  to 
all  the  people.  "If  New  York  wants  a  battleship,  its  people 
are  sufficiently  wealthy  to  buy  one/'  he  advised.  To  the  banker 
who  protested  against  our  entry  into  war  with  the  South,  by 
reason  of  cessation  of  trade  and  for  fear  that  he  would  thus 
cause  grass  to  grow  in  the  streets  of  our  cities,  he  replied :  "I 
registered  an  oath  in  heaven  to  protect  and  preserve  this  Union 
and  to  maintain  it  against  all  manner  of  assault,  even  if  we 
must  go  to  war — let  the  grass  grow  where  it  will." 

I  might  multiply  example  and  incident  and  story  to  show 
how  his  life  was  one  constant  contact  with  the  common  people. 
"God  Almighty  must  love  the  common  people  or  he  would  not 
have  made  so  many  of  them,"  he  is  reported  to  have  said. 
While  a  great  many  sayings  attributed  to  him  have  proved 
apocryphal,  this  one  is  certainly  in  line  with  his  whole  mode  of 
life  to  be  genuine.  His  favorite  hymn,  too,  is  one  that  leans  to 
the  vast  majority  of  religious  folk,  "Why  Should  the  Spirit  of 
Mortal  Be  Proud"  and  that  gem  of  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes, 
"The  Last  Leaf."  Always  and  ever,  the  serious,  the  sad  side 
of  life  was  his  portion ;  his  hard  struggle  with  poverty,  with 
adversity,  with  the  tolls  of  death,  with  an  at  times  unhappy 
home  life,  and  with  the  terrible  ordeal  which  was  his  during 
two  years  of  calamitous  warfare,  coupled  with  great  loss  of 
life,  until  the  turn  of  the  tide  at  Vicksburg  and  at  Gettysburg. 
It  seems  as  if  the  Divinity  ever  chooses  for  His  instruments  the 
shepherds  who  toil  with  their  flocks,  the  son  of  the  miner  to 
publish  His  word  and  reform  a  corrupt  religious  hierarchy,  the 
poor  lens  maker  to  illuminate  a  backward  generation,  the  poor 
Genoese  sailor  to  discover  new  continents,  the  poor  mechanic 
to  invent  the  steam  engine,  the  poor  rail-splitter  to  free  a  race 
and  stabilize  a  democracy.  No!  the  bankers,  the  merchant 
princes,  the  conquerors,  the  great  money  lenders — have  played 
but  a  poor  roll  in  the  history  of  the  world.  Call  the  roll  of  the 
centuries  from  antiquity  to  the  present  day  and  you  find  the 


resplendent  tomb  of  the  Pharaoh  is  all  that  is  left  of  might  and 
prowess  and  wealth,  but  the  frail  ill-fed  and  poorly  clad  Gandhi 
leads  the  millions  of  his  fellows  in  India.  You  will  find  Alex- 
ander and  Caesar,  brilliant  in  their  fight  for  auotcracy,  but  how 
hollow  when  compared  with  the  eternal  and  everlasting  results 
of  the  achievements  of  a  tongue-tied  Moses  and  an  humble 
Lincoln — the  first  class  worked  for  self,  the  second  for  others ; 
the  first  have  become  dim  memories  of  warning,  the  second  are 
immortal  and  live  in  the  hearts  of  grateful  succeeding  genera- 
tions. 


10 


UNIVERSITY  OF  ILLINOIS-URBANA 

973.7L63B3H44AB  C001 

ABRAHAM  LINCOLN  AND  THE  LOWLY.  NY 


3  0112  0317968* 


